The National Library of Medicine's MEDLARS (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System) computer system provides thorough subject access to more than 3,000 biomedical journals, including the principal journals in the field of biotechnology. In addition to indexing terms and bibliographic data for each journal article, many MEDLARS records have factual content as well, in the form of author abstracts published in the journal. The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) was created in 1988 as part of NLM and is charged to "support, assist, and enhance existing public information resources for biotechnology, such as nucleic acid and protein sequence databanks and other related research information resources." The purpose of this project is to enhance MEDLINE (MEDLARS OnLine) with gene sequence data from published articles so that NLM may conduct a pilot project to build literature-based factual databases in molecular biology, using mechanisms of bibliographic indexing and data entry that are already in place at NLM as part of the MEDLARS system.